End of the Big Five Project

The Big Five project consisted of me being given a brief by a client of what they want. My choice of any of the Big Five animals of a continent went over in a 10-page booklet which can be both used online but also printed; using a specific set of page layouts which they wanted, such as column number and what should be on that page, and then designing it for them. 
Initially I was going to do the big five of South America, as all of those animals interested me, but then after hearing where my peers were focusing on, and realising that I could further refine it into one country of the continent I swapped to Asia. This was because all of the key big five that most sites mentioned could be found in Borneo, and incredibly unique island and a place I was personally able to spend a month in, so I would be able to use my own experience and images when it came to creating the design.

At first I felt pretty overwhelmed, having that much freedom when it came to the design, but also being so restricted when it came to the page layouts and what information should be on each page. This for me meant I should start out slow with a lot of research, and not be afraid to change aspects of the design or create something I wouldn't generally create myself, and this really helped. Alongside this, getting feedback from my peers and reviewing their work helped me get ideas for parts that I did not know how to layout myself. Starting off by doing the My Hero project using the same program did help in this aspect as I had already started becoming comfortable with the program as well a brief that was open in some aspects but closed in others.
I did end up really enjoying this experience and how it pushed me creatively by having to create every aspect of the booklet, especially considering that I hadn't even designed a booklet before, let alone wrote parts for it. I also found it pretty easy to learn InDesign as I went along, with it having many functions similar to the other adobe software that I had used before. One thing that I did still struggle with, within the program was using the layers function within InDesign, it's something I covered that I needed to keep an eye on during the 'My Hero' section, but it was still something I didn't use. This is simply because with how easy it is to move even overlapping objects on the same layer in InDesign, I simply forgot about the layers until it was too late. The use of making scamps also helped cause this, as I would just make a copy of the file and edit right over it if I wanted to make any changes or turn it into the actual work that should be there. 

This has defiantly taught me and given me confidence in using the InDesign software, however, there are also places I could defiantly improve on. I did chose a more minimalistic style for this booklet, however if I were to do this again now that I have confidence in the software, I would be able to make something more detailed and with more overlapping aspects. The pattern I sourced, I would also either source a different one, or create my own version as it has become rather pixelated stretching it to the size that I needed, even using the scaling within Photoshop.